George

A Heavy Dose of Reality

Revisado: 04-09-22

This is history, so a lot of people won't care. This is history about WW2 which people are forgetting. Ukraine brings a lot of what this book is about back into focus. The Russians are not nice guys. Once upon a time they were our allies against the Nazis. I guess the Nazis are back, but the Russians are just psychotic authoritarians without ideological dressings. Sonya was a Commie, no doubt about it. She had few doubts. She lived in Germany. She was Jewish. The family was persecuted, but she was a Communist before Hitler was in charge. If you are a Communist, you believe that history is determined, pre-determined, but it clearly did not work out as they said.

This is kind of a weird adventure story about a fearless woman who managed to do a lot of stuff in her life. Torrid love affairs. Last minute escapes. Constant dangerous assignments. She helped to give the USSR the atom bomb, serving Fuchs. Fuchs was finally caught, but by then the Soviets knew everything. That changed the course of the world. That limited what the US could do. The Brits were stupid. This mostly happened in Britain. They knew, but they couldn't figure it out. There were Soviet agents all over the place.

The book talks realistically about the Nazis and the Stalinist purges. This was a mean and nasty period, the way the world is becoming right now. It would be better not to relive these times, but that probably isn't how things work.

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Totally Bad, Returned

Revisado: 02-20-22

I don't return many, and I've listened to the author before. This seemed like a terrible book. It starts out with gratuitous violence. The hero is a sexual psychopath. This is about some world for the rich where things get done their way. Yikes. Then the book finally gets a plot, which is some guy who is somehow tied to 60's terrorists, still out there. Oh, and there's a cop whose partner is killed, and the thing needs to be revenged. Yeah, it's the whole package of modern fiction manufacturing.

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A Lot Of Tough Insights

Revisado: 01-06-22

How do you fix pathology? How do you fix patterns that don't work? How do you take a troubled past and make it into something else? How do you move on? There are two horrible relationships, two horrible men, Henry and Sam. Henry is hard to believe, especially his letters. Henry is beyond the cringe. Sam is a study in Macho Degeneration. How does anyone have two guys like this in one life? I guess people get locked into patterns with other people. In some ways CJ is the most depressing. She doesn't get into it, but he's like a young teen made into a sex toy at a boarding school. Eventually they pay him off. This brings up two problems, for me. First off, you pay him and it's like 'Ok, you were a prostitute and now we've paid you'. Then they use the NDA, no disclosure, to seal the deal. Basically, this guy was abused, lost his sexuality, in some sense. There is no treatment, as such. It doesn't seem like the author ever broke the pattern. She had the 'normal' family deal, and left that. It's hard to find the elements of a message here. Toward the end it's like the author is saying "Dear reader, let's not dig too deep". It's like some kind of Drama Addiction. Everything is drama. The book is an expose of toxic men, an endless stream of broken male sexuality. There needs to be more of a conclusion, some path to change. It's a view of a world I don't want to live in.

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Lots of Sub-plots

Revisado: 12-05-21

It didn't seem like it was going anywhere until the last couple of hours. There's always been a theme in the Bosch stuff, the cop on the outside. Hard to see, in real life. The perps were some really bad people, but not cartoon characters. People I could believe were really that bad, that messed up. So many thrillers are just lame, with silly characters and goofy plots.

Connelly had a presence in an ABC thing, on Hulu, about the LA serial killers of the 80's. It was an interesting series, and these detectives solved real cases successfully. These were really bad guys, but a different era. Connelly seems to have made the transition to the Dark Web stuff, all the revenge stuff, all the women haters. The way this set of crimes played out, it could only be something of this era. Not that this is such a great era. It's interesting to ask if the LAPD works as well as it did back then. This book paints a bleak portrait. Pretty good book.

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Wow, This Was Complicated

Revisado: 09-09-21

The story is brilliant. The way they present it is confusing, with three narrators. The ending is very clever but also a bit perfunctory. The people are complex and not pleasant. They are sort of like the Chinese curse about an interesting life. It's a very richly textured novel, something that you don't see in the hyper violent US novels we get today. This novel has enough violence. It's a novel about Gay people, but probably not 2021 values. It's a memorable novel but it doesn't make me want to run and get the other Vine novels. It's not like Wexford. It must be nice to be two very good novelists in one, although she has passed from the scene. Will any contemporary or recent novelist be read in 50 or 100 years. Some of this novel might pass the test, but I'm dubious it will pass into literature. Maybe they are too clever and it is a clever rooted in very trendy stuff. Like this is not really a prrofound Gay novel, though it is clever.

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Baker Explains Reagan

Revisado: 08-16-21

Baker made Reagan work. The price of believing in Reagan is that we never looked at the big picture, things like climate change. Carter wanted to move away from oil, but oil lives and the Middle East will never work. Reagan was the architect of the greed culture, and that is now financial tech. Everything is a piece of paper that can be made to release a lot of money. It's not a culture that solves problems. Baker, with his totally dysfunctional family, is hard to really like. But the people he diluted were much worse. Still, we got Cheney and that segment of the GOP, Iraq and Afghanistan. There is so much truth in this book, but it is dark, depressing truth.

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The Humor is Gone

Revisado: 08-16-21

I was confused that this new main character is not full of wit, or much fun at all. Everything is pretty serious. Drug addicts, sociopaths, suicidal depressives, rich and annoying folks. It was interesting for a while, some decent social insight actually. But it is just too unrelenting, and there is no real relief. This is too far from Charles Parris. For a novelist with a million years of experience, it isn't put together all that well. A lot of stuff happens at the end, and a lot of stuff doesn't really make sense. It's a little cluttered, which is ironic. Things just seem so bleak in Britain, like the drama Unforgotten. Misery is layered and layered, and it's not clear why we need to see this as a form of art or expression. It really was only worth two stars, but it was promising for about half the book.

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A Compelling Narrative

Revisado: 05-31-21

The year 1968 was horrible for liberals. Nixon was disgraced but Reagan picked up where Goldwater left off. You could say Buchanan won with Trump, of all the Boys of 68. But we basically became a corporate state based on Wall Street values. Big Tech won. Random stuff seems to determine so many things. It’s hard to project 1968 out to today. So it’s an interesting book but it doesn’t seem to mean much.

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A lot to absorb

Revisado: 05-04-21

People who were truly anti-communist in 1946 are buried under empty politics and rabid extremism. We never have a plan and don’t follow through, as in Hungary. The country is still divided along lines that emerged 70 years ago. Ultimately, the US will matter less and less because the schemes simply fail. Over and over.

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Not the best

Revisado: 06-26-20

Kinsey’s road trip leaves a lot to be desired. Very dark and empty characters, no great insights. Bits of humor and the story moves along to a bleak end.

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